‘This ain’t agriculture’

ByBernard E. Rollin

Consider the story told to me by one of my colleagues in Animal Science at Colorado State
University. This man told of his son-in-law, who had grown up on a ranch, but could not
return to it after college because it could not support him and all of his siblings. (Notably, the
average net annual income of a Front Range – i.e. eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains –
rancher in Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana is about $35,000!) He reluctantly took a job
managing a feeder-pig barn at a large swine-factory farm:

One day he reported a disease that had struck his piglets to his boss. ‘I have bad news and
good news,’ he reported. ‘The bad news is that the piglets are sick. The good news is that
they can be treated economically.’ ‘No,’ said the boss. ‘We don’t treat! We euthanize!’ He
proceeded to demonstrate by dashing the baby pigs’ heads on the side of the concrete
pen, and then throwing the still-twitching piglet into a garbage heap. The young man
could not accept this. He bought the medicine with his own money, clocked in on his
day off, and treated the animals. They recovered, and he told the boss. The boss’s response
was ‘You’re ﬁ red!’ The young man pointed out that he had treated them with his own
time and money, and was thus not subject to ﬁ ring. He did, however, receive a reprimand in his ﬁ le. Six months later he quit and became an electrician. He wrote to his
father-in-law: ‘I know you are disappointed that I left agriculture, Dad. But this ain’t
agriculture! ’